How to Handle Group Decisions:

When dealing with a committee, there is more than just a single decision maker. These collaborative efforts can bring up special challenges for technology vendors.

Before the meeting, it’s important that you invest the proper effort in preparation for your presentation. And most of all, you need to get a good idea of the political forces acting within the group before you show up. Having this information at your disposal will help guide the structure of your presentation in such a way that it meets the major collective needs of the group.

For example, you’ll often end up working with various key people from IT, Finance, Marketing and other functional department within the company. In order to get the sale, you’ll need to focus your messaging in such a way that it effectively addresses all of their collective concerns.

Biggest mistake that you should avoid:

Before you even show up, you must absolutely make sure that all of the critical decision makers are present at the meeting.

This is for several reasons:

• Your pitch will never be as strong as the first time you present it. The second time will always come off as more stale.
• When you rely on internal word-of-mouth to relate your product benefits, you lose control over your messaging.

How to position your services when pitching to a group:

When pitching to a group, it’s important to remember that you’re not there to present your product or your technology. You’re there strictly to discuss the prospects pain points... and to offer solutions to those problems.

Too often - and this is especially true in IT – companies will structure their presentations in a very “ME-focused” way. But the customer doesn’t care about your company. All they care about is their own problems.

Before you show up, it’s important that you take the time to properly research your prospects’ concerns. And make sure that THEIR problems become the main focus of your presentation. The main message that you should be trying to get across is that you have what they want.

Try to speak in terms of benefits, and keep the technical and feature-oriented talk to a minimum. This is especially true in the case of group presentations, since a large portion of your audience might not have strong technical backgrounds.

In short, keep your presentation “customer-centric” instead of having it being centered on your company.

Following this advice alone will put you in the top 20% of all IT companies that they’re likely to speak with.

How to prepare for your presentation:

The best way to start your research is to contact all of the potential stakeholders within the company in order to understand all of their individual needs... and their reasons for evaluating your solutions.

This is important because a single unhappy spectator can easily kill the deal for you. This is why you absolutely need to make sure that everyone is acknowledged beforehand, and that you’re addressing everyone’s pain points.

Also, make sure that you’ve already gone out and understood how your competition will be approaching this deal. This will enable you to set the rules and criteria by which decisions will be made, and to lay down traps that will work against your competitors.

When you have the ability to set the ground rules in this manner, it puts you in a leadership position and helps your chances of winning.

What to focus on when presenting to groups:

Every group has a leader. And as a salesperson, part of your job will be to figure out who that is... and how to leverage this knowledge to your advantage.

Logic would tell you that the leader of the group should be the highest-ranking person. But this isn’t always the case.

Often, the leader might simply be a vocal advocate who assumed control of the project. Or maybe it’s the person who best-understands your space and has been doing a lot of the research. Or maybe it’s the person who will have to maintain the system and train internal staff once it’s installed.

It’s important to discover the leader early on, since they’re the ones who will be establishing RFP requirements, deciding which criteria are most important, and defining the rules for making the final decision.

Other advice to consider:

When it comes to pitching to a group the 2 most critical points are:

• Understand the political climate within the group
• Make sure that your messaging is focused on their pain points

Another tip would be to bring in several key members of your staff with you for the presentation. This enables you to present your company as a multi-dimensional team, with a wide range of expertise.

People like to do business with other people that they know and trust. They want to know that there’s a real human being on the other end, and that there’s a relationship with the company they hire.

By following the advice outlined in this article, you should be able to overcome most of the obstacles that come from group decisions, and substantially increase your odds of winning.

About The Author: Storagepipe is a leading provider of cloud backup software, and also offers an online backup reseller program for VARs and ISVs.

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